Soups and salads are my go-to ways to re-use leftovers. Sounds like you made an interesting soup!

Good save with the soup! Right now I can’t think of any recent saves. Like Fun posted, I do use leftovers for things. Not a save but yesterday for lunch I made a Caesar salad with leftover grilled tri-tip.

Not sure it counts as a save but this evening I intended to make to a tortilla. I opened the box of eggs and found it only contained two, not six. By adding milk and flour I turned it into a sort of thick pancake rather than a thick omelet. Still used the potatoes, favas and smoked salmon as planned.

Very clever, hobbitmom. Much more so than I am. DH and I have just been having a leftovers conversation, realizing we are wasting perfectly good food. Not wise with the cost of groceries these days.

DH never eats dinner leftovers for his lunch - not even when its something he's really enjoyed. My appetite is small and I don't make my way through all of them. I try to take advantage of the freezer but much too often - the night before garbage collection one or both of us are cleaning out the refrigerator and throwing things away. We're determined to stop that!

For the benefit of some of our US readers, I would point out that @floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK meant "tortilla"in the Spanish sense of "omelet" rather than the Mexican sense of "corn flatbread".

I once made a vegetable curry from a recipe which sounded good I found in the newspaper. Sadly, it was very bland and the batch was large. I turned it into soup with some more spices and a couple of cans of tomatoes. The soup was really, really good, but I'll never be able to replicate it :-/

We both love eating leftovers and I usually make a double batch of foods so I can store some in the freezer. Smaller amounts of leftovers I try to turn into something else or incorporate into other meals. We throw out very little food.

John Liu: That is a stellar story! Awesome indeed!!!

I mentioned this in another thread recently, so it came right to mind, and really is the best ever save I've made: I was trying to make my own poppy seed filling for pastries. That much poppy seed, unlike the quarter teaspoon one might use otherwise, is pricy. I tried a marble spice mortar and pestal. I tried the food processor. I tried everything in between. All I got were abraded whole poppy seeds. I gave up. But had to come up with something to do with the abraded poppy seeds. Found a yeast rising cake recipe in a book. Made that. It was weird and gray, but almost kind of pale celadon green. It didn't taste bad, but it was way heavy for all that it did rise. I added some stale bread crusts, mixed types, and made bread pudding. It was amazing as bread pudding. It was even better with hard sauce. The guests adored it. Totally irreproducible, but great.

Another save which I find myself doing is turning a strawberry pavlova into an Eton Mess. My meringues are not foolproof.

“I also quietly made sure my car wasn’t blocked in.”

Loved your post, John!👍🏻

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK, every so often I make home made meringues for my MIL, who loves them and loathes shop bought ones. When I have extras I make Eton Mess, which DH refers to as "half eaten mess" LOL

I just remembered a kind of save I made a few years ago when Covid was fairly new. Our DD and SIL were visiting from Melbourne and we had rented a holiday house in the city for us all to stay in. From there we went to a family lunch at my MIL's; I cooked the food and we had roast beef with lots of vegetables. There were a fair amount of leftovers. The next morning my SIL woke up with Covid symptoms, so he went off to have a Covid test while DH did some grocery shopping in case we had to isolate for a week. I turned the leftover roast beef and vegetables into a really yummy beef and vegetable soup, which we enjoyed after getting the good news that SIL just had a bad cold.

Great story, John! LOL!